Bot Management for Gaming

How is automated bot traffic affecting your gaming website? Web scraping and subsequently arbitrage betting, are amongst the top automated threats to the gaming industry, with cyber-criminals becoming increasingly adept at exploiting the odds to their advantage.

Netacea is helping the gaming industry to protect their customers and their revenue with our revolutionary Intent Analytics™ engine. We’re putting fast and accurate website, mobile app and API data in your hands so you can intelligently mitigate unwanted traffic and prioritise legitimate users.

Bots are commonly used by aggregators to enable automated arb-betting. Automation makes compiling odds from multiple sportsbooks quick and easy, the bot operator can then promote which bets and what stakes are needed to guarantee a profit.

This activity amplifies the chances of the bookmaker being on the losing side and is detrimental to overall Gross Win percentage.

Web scrapers are used to quickly gather a large quantity of data from a target website or mobile application to be repurposed elsewhere.

Scraping is a commonly used automated technique in lots of industries, and it can be used with good intent; for instance, search engine spiders are scraper bots put to legitimate use. However, they can also have a detrimental impact on a business if created with bad intent by threat actors.

In the gaming industry, scrapers are used to scrape odds from across websites by competitors and aggregators, who will use the data to manipulate odds to their own advantage or promote bets to the deliberate detriment of a business.

Incentives, such as sign up bonuses or credits, for new and existing players are common in the gaming industry. These bonuses are, in effect free money that can be leveraged to maximise the player’s profitability.

It’s not difficult to see why bad actors target these offers, creating multiple free accounts and even bypassing restrictions on qualifying bets when used in combination with arb-betting.

The challenge for gaming organisations who lack the support of a sophisticated bot management solution, is preventing the scale-up technique. Fraudsters utilise automated bot traffic to create multiple accounts from a variety of IPs and place their stake before internal teams can detect and stop the activity.